'You know my aversion to Modernism in all forms' T.S.
Eliot to John Hayward 27 January 1937 [unpublished letter]

Virginia Woolf's 'assertion ... that on or about December
1910 human character changed' has provided a useful myth for
modernist studies, enabling it to declare that modernism was
revolutionary with respect to consciousness, that it had an early
twentieth-century beginning, and that its trigger was not a particular
bounded event and, therefore, not a conventional event as such. (1) The
formulation is discursively attractive because the exact cause of change
is unspecified, active but hidden within a vague period, some overlooked
but potentially seismic incident of the everyday perhaps that passed
undetected, at least initially. Because of this imprecision, modernist
studies can construct, deconstruct and reconstruct the contents of this
myth. It can also acknowledge, with judicious reflectiveness, that,
since those we call modernists never called themselves modernists, the
term modernism must be a back projection, an exogenous term. Even
supposedly early designations from within the modernist period like R.A.
Scott-James's Modernism and Romance (1908) and Robert Graves and
Laura Riding's Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) seem to confirm
this. Whilst both studies acknowledge the force of new cultural trends,
they ultimately refuse, sceptically, to embrace them. They are not,
therefore, 'endogenous' nor, in fact, early. Acknowledging
that the concept of modernism is a construct, modernist studies is able
nevertheless to re-inscribe itself by exploiting uncertainty and
redefining its own apparently nebulous terms. (2)

One reason that the term modernism remains problematic is because
its usage has come to conceal, I suggest, an intense, internationally
extended ideological and cultural conflict round about 1910, which built
its discourse around this very term: a conflict in the theological field
known as the Modernist controversy. It features in histories of
religion, Catholicism or theology in the twentieth century; (3) but is
still ignored or sidelined as a matter of course in surveys or
anthologies of 'modernism'. (4) The relation between
theological and cultural modernism has received only sporadic
acknowledgement until its recent appearance within a limited number of
closely focused studies that may refer to the modernist controversy as a
key context for a general cultural upheaval. (5) Malcolm Bull's
observation from 1992 is still pertinent: 'modernism in the arts
and modernism in theology ... are rarely discussed in the same context.
This is surprising'. (6)

This theological conflictwas, I claim here, as central to the age
as those factors usually cited as the contexts of modernity and
modernism, including advances in science and technology, the emergence
of new disciplines such as sociology, psychology and anthropology and
such cataclysmic or momentous events as the First World War, the Easter
Rising in Ireland, the Russian Revolution or the Amritsar massacre; not
forgetting, of course, the women's movement. As a context, it was
both a symptom in its reactions against modernity, and also a cause of
further reactions which established substance and perspectives for
cultural modernism. 'Modernism' is not, as Perry Anderson
declared, an empty category at all. (7) Rather than abandoning this
problematic term, its complex usage should be more thoroughly
historicised and the particular 'modernist crisis' should be
acknowledged and integrated.

This article's overall argument is that theological modernism,
as described in four Papal encyclicals issued by Pope Pius X from 1907
to 1910, and its contexts, have been unjustifiably neglected outside
religious studies. I suggest that they should play a far larger role in
our sense of the contexts of modernist culture. I will briefly describe
what theological modernism was, and discuss its roots and relation to
the term 'modernism, as it was being variously deployed in Europe
in the foregoing period. I will discuss some of its cultural impacts and
indicate some of the relations between 'theological modernism'
and 'cultural modernisms'. One of these impacts was to give a
new impetus in the application of the term to cultural forms. Against
the backdrop of this controversy, the term, whose use was already more
widespread than is generally recognised, could be used with a sharper
set of nuances. (8)

Another impact, though it is beyond the scope of this article to
illustrate it extensively, is that cultural practices were affected too:
the controversy and its resolution, in which a reactionary institution
won a major campaign, sharpened the sense of what was at stake in the
on-going conflict between modernism and traditionalism, the secular and
the religious, spiritualism and materialism, claims for the absolute and
for the relative. This was the case for writers of various political
shades, whether anarchists, socialists, liberals, conservatives or
nascent conservatives. Cultural forms can be grouped according to their
relation to this controversy and its terms, the ripples of which
continued well into the 1930s, at least, as the epigram from T.S. Eliot
shows. I believe the controversy confirms 1910 as an evolutionary
watershed for progressive cultural forms, so that Woolf's
intimation was correct, although it seems that she was unaware of the
reasons for this. In simplistic terms, progressive secular art prior to
1910 is wedded to realism but perceived mostly to be pessimistic at the
prospect of a world without faith. Although this mode doesn't
disappear, it is, after 1910, joined by practices which, across a broad
front, enthusiastically embrace a variety of forms and attitudes that
had been demonized by the antimodernist movement of the Catholic Church
(this was not necessarily a coincidence). This is true, for example,
within fictional narrative, of the intuitive and subjective modes that
were enriching interiority of character. Following a period in which the
Church expressed intense hostility to the idea that dogma might evolve
and also sought to shore up the absolute sense of its own absolute
permanence, the cultural field produced a string of manifestos that
acknowledged the contingencies of history and the ephemerality of
cultural forms. Ironically, it is no longer compulsory for clerics to
declare 'the Oath against Modernism': it is, in a sense,
history. The modernist manifestos have, however, endured, even if they
too are treated, in a different sense, as history.

The Oath Against Modernism

In December 1910, modernism and the modernists were far from
nebulous or marginal terms. On the contrary, they had literally been
headline news for some years. What is more, they were perceived to be
more coherent and more of a significant threat (to a particular
body--the Catholic Church) than ever before or, perhaps, since. If there
was a momentous change around December 1910, it was less likely to have
been brought about by an art exhibition at the Grafton Gallery in
London, exciting as that may have been; the change is more likely to be
due to Pope Pius X's encyclical, issued in September 1910, now
known as 'The Oath against Modernism'.

This document represented the conclusion of a struggle that had
been raging within the oldest global institution and arguably the most
significant religious institution in the world--the Catholic Church.
Victory would help establish the character of the Vatican for most of
the twentieth century. In spite of a brief liberal period in 1967 (when
the Oath was rescinded), the Vatican has never compromised on the
reactionary positions it established in the 19 th Century. (9) If we are
to look for the effect on 'human character' to which Woolf
gestured, it may be found within perceptions of the void that opened up
between progressive liberal individuals and a reactionary global
institution, which has, through these reactionary strategies, survived
the nineteenth and the twentieth century more unscathed than any other
institution, whether religious or political.

The Oath against Modernism was the last of four encyclicals devoted
to an aggressive critique of trends in modern thought. The other three
were the Lamentabili Sane of 3 July 1907; the Pascendi Dominici Gregis
(On the Doctrine of the Modernists) from 8 September 1907; and the
Praestantia Scripturae (On the Bible Against the Modernists) from 18
November 1907. The first of these listed sixty-five erroneous
propositions which were to be 'condemned and proscribed'.
These included such errors as that God is not in fact the author of the
Sacred Scriptures (no. 9); that Church dogma was not a set of heavenly
truths but 'interpretations' (no. 22); that 'the Roman
Church became the head of all the churches, not through the ordinance of
Divine Providence, but merely through political conditions' (no.
56). (10) Pascendi, the second encyclical, nearly 22,000 words in
length, was the most significant and impassioned of all four documents,
declaring that the modernists 'lay the axe not to the branches and
shoots, but to the very root, that is to the faith and its deepest
fires.'11 The third raised the stakes by threatening
excommunication to any who disagreed with anything in the first two
documents. (12) The fourth, in 1910, was the final coup: all
'clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors,
professors in philosophical-theological seminaries', had to swear
this oath.

I--firmly embrace and accept each and every definition that has
been set forth and declared by the unerring teaching authority of
the Church, especially those principal truths which are directly
opposed to the errors of this day. I reject that method of judging
and interpreting Sacred Scripture which ... embraces the
misrepresentations of the rationalists and with no prudence or
restraint adopts textual criticism as the one and supreme norm....
Finally, I declare that I am completely opposed to the error of the
modernists who hold that there is nothing divine in sacred
tradition. (13)

Since 1907, the Vatican had established the term modernism as a
pejorative label to indicate a heterogeneous set of intellectual groups
and individuals within the Catholic Church, whose work, taken as one,
constituted 'the synthesis of all heresies'. (14) Unified by
this term, the 'modernists' did not themselves exist as a
group: individually they were focused on quite different aims, all
hoping though that the Church might evolve its dogma or structures so as
to come into harmony with diverse progressive ideas. These included
evolution, historicised textuality, hermeneutic indeterminacy,
socialism, secularism, communism, feminism, and immanentism. These were
at that time emerging from various academic disciplines or discursive
fields, such as philology and philosophy, social and political science,
biology and zoology and also of course theology. The label ignored the
heterogeneity of these ideas and the people who promoted them as part of
a strategy of containment and eradication.

The Times, on 9 September 1910, broadcast the fact of this
document. Two months later (while Roger Fry's Post-Impressionist
exhibition was showing) it reported, under the headline 'The
Persecution of the Modernists', that 'The Vatican continues to
carry on with characteristic pertinacity its war against Modernism,
supplying a useful potted history of this 'war':

It began with disciplinary measures against certain priests, and
the addition of a good many books to the list of the prohibited;
... then severer personal measures, and lastly, two months ago, the
condemnation of 'Le Sillon'. (15)

'Le Sillon' ['the Furrow'] was a movement in
France that was hoping to promote Christian social democracy, and the
idea, modelled on certain Republican ideals, that Church hierarchy could
evolve as society was evolving. The Times noted also that 'all
teaching of natural science' would have to be supervised, and that
'all discussion ... of subjects bearing on the Modernist
controversy' would be prohibited. (16)

In 1918, a fascinating summary of what this 'movement'
had been, emphasising its philosophical heritage, appeared in a review
of Maude Petre's Modernism, by the Dean of St Paul's, William
Inge. Petre was a British Catholic nun, sympathetic to George Tyrrell, a
leading English modernist priest, who had been excommunicated and
refused Catholic burial at his death in 1909. Inge's view overlaps
strikingly with certain constructions of the intellectual heritage of
cultural modernism:

It would require an essay to trace its affinities with subjective
idealism, with post-Kantian relativism, with French fideisme, with
American pragmatism, and with the philosophy of Bergson. In the
Pascendi this philosophy is described as 'laying the axe to the
very root, that is, to faith in its deepest fibres ... they only
turn Him into a psychological monster.' (17)

Theological and cultural modernism, as the former is constructed
here and as the latter is often constructed in accounts of its
intellectual inheritance, have certain identical affinities. The most
obvious of these is Bergson's philosophy and the attendant interest
in knowledge by intuition (which itself has an origin in Pascal's
fideisme, also mentioned by Inge); 'subjective idealism' and
certain ideas of William James (alluded to in 'American
pragmatism') are also shared between them.

During the inter-war period that we have come to think of as
'modernist', theological modernism and cognate terms appeared
continually in newspapers and journals. The Times Literary Supplement
would describe the outcome in 1919 as 'The Triumph of
Anti-modernism'. The crisis of modernism may have been resolved
within the Catholic Church, but it also sparked off a crisis in the
Anglican Church and in America too in the early 1920s, where debates
around similar issues continued especially in Christian fundamentalist
circles. In 1926 Bernard Bell's Postmodernism was reviewed in the
TLS; (18) and in 1928, T.S. Eliot offered the following patronising
explanation for 'why [modernism] is dead':

And that, I think, is the real point about Modernism, and the
reason why it is dead. Modernists thought that they were trying to
reconcile ancient feeling with modern thought and science. If that
had been what they were trying to do, they might have been more
successful; but they were really attempting something much more
difficult--the reconciliation of antagonistic currents of feeling
within themselves. This is the real issue; and they remain tragic
not because some of them suffered in the real world, or suffered
excommunication by the Church: that is a slight matter compared to
the division in their own hearts. (19)

Between 1907 and 1930 there were over 350 references to the term in
The Times: ninety per cent of these refer to the theological context of
Modernism; the remainder feature in articles on architecture, music or
literature. The word modernism in this period could hardly be used
without some echo of this other sense. In 1931, the Contemporary Review
could speak of the 'Death of Modernism'. (20) Through a series
of repressive measures, the Catholic Church had, effectively, won the
war. During a period dominated by war, revolution and the collapse of
many European institutions, this survival was exceptional.

A History of the term 'Modernism'

Before giving more local illustration of this impact, I will
present shifts in the deployment of the term, an ambivalent term,
chiefly during the nineteenth century in Europe, where it moved back and
forth between the 'cultural' and 'theological'
fields. Just as Frank Kermode said in 1968, that 'somebody should
write the history of the word "modern"', so the history
of the word 'modernism' needs to be written. (21) This will
lead to a clearer understanding of the affinities between theological
and cultural modernism and help explain why Pope Pius X chose the word
as a banner under which to group the Church's internal enemies.

This history begins with its status as a pejorative term within
conservative cultural commentary to designate something
'new-fangled'. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Jonathan
Swift using it in this sense in the early eighteenth century and it
appeared in this way in Notes and Queries throughout the nineteenth
century. To call something a 'modernism' in this publication,
was to mark out signifier and signified as unnecessarily new, a sign of
bad-taste. The issues to which it attaches itself are trivial and
philological: the nonce word 'steel' in Vanity Fair; the
second 'o' in London, for instance. (22)

These trivial pejorative associations were augmented in 1853 by
John Ruskin to signal an extensive and decadent world-view, as Malcolm
Bull pointed out. (23) In a lecture focusing on
'pre-Raphaelitism', Ruskin offensively projected an
influential contrast between medievalism and modernism, demonizing the
latter: 'Your present education, to all intents and purposes,
denies Christ, and that is intensely and peculiarly modernism ... all
ancient art was religious, and all modern art is profane.' (24) In
Ruskin's wake, the term gradually became more ideologically
freighted --a sign that the conception of the 'new' was itself
changing, its power of transformation increasing exponentially. There
will therefore develop a market of curious consumers, for whom new
discourses critically addressing new issues will be on display. The
Essays and Reviews controversy of 1860 contributed to this. Benjamin
Jowett's call for reform in traditional methods of interpreting the
Bible, after the 'Higher Criticism' had questioned its textual
condition, led to different degrees of scepticism about faith and dogma.
(25)

The debate seems to have been more shrill in post-1848 Europe:
Abraham Kuyper's HetModernisme (1871), was a powerful Calvinist
indictment of 'modernism' as a secular naturalism which,
according to Kuyper, had roots in the French Revolution. (26) Charles
Perin, an Ultramontane, titled an 1881 pamphlet based around
correspondence of the radical theologian Hugues La Mennais, LeModernisme
dans LEglise. Drawing perhaps on Kuyper, he defines the term:
'L'essence du modernisme, c'est la pretention
d'eliminer Dieu de toute vie sociale.' He feels the need to
explain the novelty of this term within the French language, explaining
that its roots lay in Revolutionary movements:

Le terme de modernisme ... pourrait donner lieu a un reproche de
neologisme. Le mot est nouveau, j'en conviens; il n'a pas ete
employe jusqu'ici avec la signification que je lui donne. Pourtant,
si l'on veut bien remarquer que, suivant le langage adopte par tous
les ecrivains de l'ecole de 89, les idees modernes resument toutes
les conceptions, toutes les pretentions politiques et sociales de
la Revolution, on trouvera peut-etre que l'emploi du terme
modernisme est suffisamment justifie. On reconnaitra qu'il n'en est
point qui exprime mieux, en un seul mot, les tendances humanitaires
de la societe contemporaine.
[The essence of modernism is the hope that God be eliminated from
all social life.... The term 'modernism' might prompt the reproach
that it is a neologism. The word is new, I grant; it has not been
used before now with the meaning that I am giving it. However, if
one may grant that, following the language adopted by all those
writers of the school of 1789, modern ideas resurrect all the
conceptions, all the political and social ambitions of the
Revolution, then one might agree that the use of the term
'modernism' is sufficiently justified.] (27)

Perm's defence captures nicely a contradiction in pejorative
uses of the term: as a neologism it is itself a modernism. But needs
must where demonization is the driving force. Modernism doesn't
only deny Christ, as Ruskin claimed; for Perm, it wishes to eliminate
him. According to Bruno Migliorini, the term 'modernisme' soon
crossed the Alps from Perin's France, flowering in the
Vatican's Civilta Cattolica in 1883. (28)

In England, Thomas Hardy revisited Ruskin's sense of the
denial of Christ in Tess of the DUrbervilles, through a vaguer allusion
to a general trend. Tess's narrator, focalising through Angel,
pompously diagnoses Tess's view of life, as 'an ache of
modernism'. Angel, bookish, and a budding cultural critic, thinks
he has achieved an understanding of her when he concludes: 'She was
expressing ... feelings which might almost have been called those of the
age--the ache of modernism.'29 Hardy was soon to be represented as
bewailing something about 'the age', diagnosing a pessimism
produced by a lack of faith. But he is more precisely revealing
something about Angel--who coins the phrase in order to flatter his own
critical grasp of the contemporary, and of woman and nature being
despoiled by what is presumed to be progress of various kinds. When Tess
eventually reveals how Alec had raped her, the flaws in his assumptions
are in turn exposed. Hardy is diagnosing those who misdiagnose the
'ache' of 'the age', as being ignorant of the actual
experience of women.

Some six years after Tess, the Methodist cultural critic Geoffrey
Northcroft adopted Angel's phrase without sensing any ambivalence
in it:

The ache of modernism ... finds us all. We are too much the
children of the hour to be untouched by it.... To spend a day in
the public library of any modern city, turning to the shelves
whereon the army of modern novelists shoulder each other for room,
is to come inevitably into touch with the ache of modernism. It is
significant that, in the main, the present day minor prophets are
men who undervalue or entirely reject the influence of
Christianity. (30)

Modernism is a symptom of irreligion according to Northcroft.
Steeped in literary works by Oliver Schreiner, Guy de Maupassant and
George Egerton, he finds it embodied in Grant Allen's The Woman who
Did, and in Max Nordau's Degeneration. Culture, in this context,
has a religious axis that is essential to it and it is to be judged by
its position on this axis. Northcroft's tone is, however,
defeatist; it is more resigned than Perin or Kuyper. From the context of
theological modernism, Northcroft's list of writers constitute, I
suggest, the first phase of cultural modernism, where the secular turn
is accompanied, in criticism especially, with a sigh, with fear or
anxiety. In the second phase after 1910, the turn is either more
indifferent or, outraged by the reactionary tactics of the Vatican,
aggressively supportive of theological modernism as a form of
liberalism: positive associations of 'modernism' encroach
increasingly on the term, which has to shuffle off the religious
connotations.

Angel's phrase is picked up in 1908 by the journalist and
cultural critic R.A. Scott-James, whose study has been noticed by
Randall Stevenson and Astradur Eysteinsson. (31) Like Northcroft,
Scott-James sees no irony in Hardy's use of the phrase, but
denounces failures of culture from a religious perspective, and sets up
modernism in opposition to Romance, just as Ruskin had opposed it to
Medievalism. He also follows the tradition of defending usage of the
term and must therefore negotiate the Vatican's recent
appropriation:

the first word of my title does not bear the special theological
meaning which it has lately acquired. Theologians have a knack of
appropriating words and destroying their value for all other
purposes than their own. (32)

There is a struggle for domination over this voguish term between
institutions of religion and of culture. It has, suitably, become modish
and is up for grabs. Getting the association right becomes an urgent
matter. The sense Scott-James wishes to project onto it will be distinct
from the Vatican and more general: 'there are characteristics of
modern life in general which can only be summed up, as Mr Thomas Hardy
and others have summed them up, by the word modernism.' (33) His
examples are literary, but his ways of framing the fictional narratives
and of defining modernism, misrepresent Catholic antimodernism and are
closer to the Vatican than he would like to think. He attacks, for
example, the way 'modernism' is wedded to the 'Scientific
Method':

There is a scientific method of history, a scientific method in
literary scholarship; and theology itself, the ancient enemy of
science, has admitted its methods in the 'Higher Criticism'. (34)

But theology was in fact split in its attitude to the 'Higher
Criticism', and the task of orthodox Catholic theology was to
expunge the conclusions of 'higher criticism' from all its
seminaries. Moreover, the Vatican's focus on the movement is more
developed, and projects a sharper sense of its pernicious qualities. At
this time, as Malcolm Bull has observed, 'the priority of the
religious variety [of modernism was] indisputable'. (35) Once its
work was done, however, the Vatican more or less dispensed with the
term. Silence and a studied indifference were effective weapons to
achieve closure and could be viewed as signs of victory. After Pius X
died, in August 1914, the first encyclical of his successor, Benedict
XV, urged that any remaining modernism, which was still 'lurking in
hidden places', be 'stamped out'. His critique focuses
not only on modernism as a set of theological errors, but on something
that is a broader cultural trend: 'Those who are infected by that
spirit [of modernism] develop a keen dislike for all that savours of
antiquity and become eager searchers after novelties in
everything'. (36) (This would be the last occasion on which
Benedict XV used the term in any encyclicals.) Gesturing beyond its
jurisdiction towards culture more generally, the Vatican can pause here,
its work for the time being completed. Debates about the term are, from
this point on, essentially closed down in orthodox Catholic circles.
(37) The term can now evolve in the cultural field in a different
direction, paving the way for an eventual counter-appropriation of the
term as a positive sign.

The positive counter-appropriation has some precedents which are
important to note. In 1890, for instance, in the United States,
'modernism' appears in a faintly comic and secular context
with reference to an increased pace of life, and to new communication
technologies. The New York Times relayed a frantic chain of events as
they had been reported in the Chicago Mail.

A young lawyer who recently hung out a shingle had an experience
yesterday which aptly illustrates the haste with which modernism
scoots along. This young lawyer tried a case before a local
Justice, was called a liar by a witness, engaged in a fight with
the vituperative person, was arrested, fined $25 for assault, and
filed an appeal from his Honor's decision. All this within a single
hour. Even in the practice of law the stage coach has been replaced
by the lightning express. (38)

'Modernism' is here associated with technology and the
robust quality of characters whose traumas can be alleviated by
narrative speed. It is unsentimental. This usage is also devoid of any
religious dimension. The story contains a seed for silent slapstick
movies to come, a Chaplinesque 'modernism', now a dominant
form within modernist studies but, at the time, a rare association. An
alternative positive construal of the term appears around the same time,
but back in a 'theological' context. In the liberal Review of
Reviews from August 1894, an article about Arthur Penrhyn Stanley
(1815-1881), the Dean of Westminster, is titled 'The Prophet of
Modernism', saying that, 'unlike the medievalist Pusey',
he:

looks onward with serene, happy confiding demeanour, with a joyous
eager expectancy, with an aspiration and an unfaltering faith ...
in the well-recognised direction of liberty, independence, justice
mutual tolerance and love ... The Church of the English nation is
bounded to be the Pantheon of religious liberalism as well as of
secular culture and knowledge ... Englishmen ... will never again
lose their necks to fanaticism or to priestly and sacramental rule.
(39)

The positive construal of 'modernism' associates it with
liberalism and a scarcely concealed sectarianism with respect to
Catholics. Not all cultural flows went down the channel that Ruskin had
devised. One last example of a positive spin, from 1908, describes
George Meredith, an un-Victorian Victorian:

From the date of his earliest novels he anticipated what we
understand to-day by Modernism. The Victorian age was one of
idealism and spirituality, of sentiment that at its best was
exalted and noble, and its worst was sentimentality. Religion or
religious philosophy was an important element. Mr. Meredith reacted
against nearly every trait of his own times, and in reacting
towards the past he produced a new type, a future, which has
already become the present with us.... Sentiment and emotion are
drawn as weakness and follies; sentimentality is the cardinal sin.
Instead of idealism he gives us almost scientific naturalism, and
the love passion is frankly physical. (40)

Both 'scientific naturalism' and a 'lack of
sentimentality' are being fused onto 'modernism'. (These
associations often surround Flaubert and his 'doctrine' of
impersonality.) The attack on excessive pity (and pity as a Christian
virtue) is a strategy which chimes with Nietzscheanism. The relatively
positive spin on 'modernism' occurs at the colder and more
satirical end of progressive and anti-Victorian cultural trends. It is
entirely distinct from any of the associations projected onto
'modernism' by the Vatican. But it is not difficult to see how
an unsentimental impersonality will have few regrets about seeing the
struggles of a decaying institution.

The Impact of Theological Antimodernism

Having amassed various associations around the term modernism,
mostly negative but occasionally positive, we have established framing
contexts within which we can read the Vatican's deployment of the
term, and the cultural reaction to that deployment. These associations
either directly influenced the Church (as Kuyper and Perin's almost
certainly did) or are merely coincidental, as in the case of those
associations that it has with the increasing pace of communication or
with anti-sentimentalism. The coincidental associations, however, are
important for understanding the subsequent struggles over ownership of
the term and the various ideologies at stake. To get a sense of these
struggles, we can now return to the impact that the controversy had upon
the cultural field. Lacking space for a full account of this impact, I
shall limit myself here to indicating how widespread the reaction was.
Kinds of impact can be grouped along a spectrum, with explicit responses
at one end, and subtler, more indirect consequences at the other. I
shall look at specific instances of the first, before concluding with a
brief discussion of the latter.

The controversy, as mentioned, received wide coverage in The Times.
It featured also in such journals as TheFreewoman, Rhythm, Poetry, and,
in particular, The New Age which responded almost immediately after
Pascendi Gregis was issued: 'The Encyclical is a wholesale
declaration of war against freedom of thought'. (41) In the
following week it was predicting 'what will probably be the final
battle between the medieval and modern methods of thought'. Taking
a pro-modernist standpoint, and seeing a clear cultural politics at
stake, it presented the conflict as emblematic of individual freedom
against the authority of the state:

It is this attitude towards divine revelation, the inductive
conception which goes for religious apologetics to the feelings of
innumerable human units, instead of deriving them from general
principles, the acceptance of which was imposed on individual
units; this attitude which makes the basis of personal religion
intrinsic, resting on common experience, rather than extrinsic,
resting on authority, which the Pope has attacked in his latest
Encyclical. (42)

The article that follows immediately does so seamlessly in terms of
its liberal cultural politics. 'The Menace of Censorship'
responds to the censorship of Edward Garnett's play 'The
Breaking-Point' and then forms a progressive canon from a list of
then censored plays such as Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts, Maurice
Maeterlinck's Monna Vanna, Leo Tolstoy's Power of Darkness,
and Oscar Wilde's Salome. England, it declares ought not to
'sweep back ... the tide of dramatic intellect and tragedy that is
flowing freshly all over the rest of Europe.' (43) Pascendi Gregis
thus helped to define the battle lines and, by making martyrs of
'modernists', cemented the relation of 'modernism'
to individual freedom in culture. Over the coming months and years The
New Age frequently returned to orthodoxy and heterodoxy, especially in
George Bernard Shaw's debates with G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire
Belloc. When John Middleton Murry launched Rhythm in 1911, his editorial
'Art and Philosophy' used the word 'modernism' in a
way that seems to consider it purely cultural, and in now familiar
terms: 'Modernism ... penetrates beneath the outward surface of the
world, and disengages the rhythms that lie at the heart of things,
rhythms strange to the eye, unaccustomed to the ear, primitive harmonies
of the world.' But the article is also fundamentally a celebration
of Bergsonian intuition and, with it, an attack on Religion:
'Religion and morality alike mean for the western world that this
life fades away into the colourless intensity of the world to come....
Art is against religion or religion itself.' (44) I would suggest
that, containing an allusion to the terms of the controversy, this is an
exploitation of those terms for Murry's radical rhetoric.

In The Freewoman of 15 February 1912, a precocious Rebecca West
reviewed Mrs Humphry Ward's avowedly pro-reformist novel, The Case
of Richard Meynell, sympathetic to theological modernism in its social
guise. West mocks Ward's novels for describing 'a movement ...
sweeping over the country and turning the hearts of Englishmen to flame.
This Modernist Movement is', West then claims:

alien from, not only the Englishman, but from the human mind. Jesus
of Nazareth sits in a chamber of every man's brain, immovable,
immutable, however credited or discredited. The idea of Christ ...
is as securely protected from 'modernising' as the tragedy of
'Hamlet.' Ward ... does not understand that the Englishman, having
discovered something that, whether true or not, is glorious to the
human soul, is not going to tamper with it. This misunderstanding
is so typical of her class. (45)

West's lurching criticism of class reflects a complexity in
the battle lines, as much as a specific ideology. Within a single
publication like The Freewomen, we see currents flowing in different
directions. Thus, in a subsequent issue Edith A. Browne writes frothily
about seeing The Futurist exhibition, first in Paris then in London,
asserting her modern taste and the potential for such radical judgement
in the British Public:

I can most sincerely appreciate the modernist movements in Art ...
Hitherto, every charge of lack of artistic appreciation that may
have been brought by the Modernist Painters against the British
Public has included me among the 'guilty' masses.'

Significantly here, Browne at first feels the need to specify that
the modernist movements she is referring to are happening 'in
Art', thus qualifying the more widespread contemporary association
of the term with theology. Browne is a convert to a new heterodoxy which
is revolutionary, and so her pleasures as a spectator are expressed with
reference to revolution: 'the spectator is immediately transformed
into one of the people vitally concerned in that revolution, and
transported into the midst of the scene'. (46)

Returning to The Times, which paid continuous attention to the
controversy, we can see the term spread. Here it surfaces during 1913 in
the context of the Irish Home Rule Crisis with a sectarian attack on
Catholic attitudes:

History and present-day fact leave us with little doubt on that
head ... Liberty generates 'modernism,' and 'modernism' is another
name for intellectual independence and freedom for social progress.
(47)

Terminological overlap between theological and cultural modernism
is clear also in the following 1914 letter to The Times entitled the
'Battle of Styles in Architecture: Liberty and Convention'. It
compares the cultural confrontation to:

that now raging in another field, in which tradition and authority
are arrayed against what is understood as Modernism ... No art is
of any value except so far as it reflects the conditions of its own
age, and no other. In art, at all events, there is no hope of life
except in Modernism. (48)

When alluding to 'Modernism,' the writer here, as with
Browne earlier, has to single out the context of 'art, at all
events' as a contrasting comparison with 'another field'
-being theology. The cliche of modernist art that it is an assault on
convention takes shape in part from reacting against the
antimodernists' attack on those who were assaulting the conventions
of dogma. The specific focus on architecture is broadened out to all art
forms, via a general principle that one should reflect the conditions of
one's age through a 'responsive' modernism. There is a
synthesis of all art forms into a single movement reflecting a general
trend. The comparison with the theological controversy is vital in
helping to define the contemporary, and making it possible to associate
art with modernism, liberty and recent discoveries in science.

Chesterton and Shaw, who took up these debates explicitly against
each other, help define an obvious place for the polemic. Introducing a
volume of journalistic pieces published in 1915, some seven years before
he converted to Catholicism, Chesterton considered modernism in general
to be a sign of superficial faddishness:

I have said much against a mere modernism. When I use the word
'modernism,' I am not alluding specially to the current quarrel in
the Roman Catholic Church, though I am certainly astonished at any
intellectual group accepting so weak and unphilosophical a name. It
is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself
a modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite ... . The
real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of
snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by
reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is
specially up to date or particularly 'in the know.' To flaunt the
fact that we have had all the last books from Germany is simply
vulgar; like flaunting the fact that we have had all the last
bonnets from Paris. To introduce into philosophical discussions a
sneer at a creed's antiquity is like introducing a sneer at a
lady's age. It is caddish because it is irrelevant. The pure
modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the
fashion. (49)

As with West, an imputed claim of intellectual superiority is
translated negatively as an unjustified and democratically less
acceptable claim to social superiority. But just because something is
'up to date' does not mean that it is only of the day and will
not have enduring effects. A discovery in science or scholarship will
bring about change if it is significant, and is distinct from changes in
fashion, which resemble the cyclical non-change of seasons. Chesterton
and Shaw tend to be outside the conventional canon of Modernist
literature, because of their perceived conventionality with respect to
form. As a result there is little direct work on the conflicting ways
they responded to the Vatican's 'war'. It also draws
attention away from their impact within what has become canonical. One
welcome effect of developing a focus on the relations between cultural
and theological modernism, would be to help shift this canon.

Conclusion

One could fruitfully explore and illustrate at greater length such
direct impacts and polemical issues, the diverse European dimensions and
the responses to the many excommunications and book burnings. But
turning to less direct impacts in the cultural field could, quite
properly, I think, take in the major landmarks of cultural modernism.
Offering more appealing material for discussion, it would also require a
more thorough analysis to indicate the indirect, subterranean exchanges
within the intellectual environment. One uncontroversial example of such
an impact is T. S. Eliot's turn in the mid 1920s towards an
orthodox form of Anglicanism; far less widely known is Joyce's
subtle reference in 'The Dead' to Pope Pius X's very
first Encyclical. This included a reform of choral song in Churches that
expelled women from choirs, indirectly an attack on the women's
movement. This took from Gabriel Conroy's aged musical aunts one of
their only sources of pleasure and, indeed, income. (50) The first
chapter of Ulysses shows three different ways of being oriented towards
theological modernism: Mulligan wishes for a 'new Paganism';
Haines is a follower of Newman, who believes in a personalised relation
to God; and Stephen is a 'horrible example of free thought', a
modernist avant-la-lettre who has, somehow, gone too far, and provides
an echo of the renegade English Jesuit, George Tyrrell. (51) T. E.
Hulme's rejection of romanticism and espousal of classicism,
constitute a turn towards the necessity of the Absolute that orthodoxy
provides, to restrict man's romantic sense of his potential. In
'Romanticism and Classicism, Hulme's allusion to, amongst
others, Maurras, the staunch French anti-democrat supporter of Pius X,
associates Hulme clearly with the Catholic right. (52) Hulme is thought
to have had a significant influence on both Imagism and Vorticism and it
is relevant here that May Sinclair in The Egoist finds a Catholicism in
the Imagist dogma of literalism: 'The Victorian poets are
Protestant. For them the bread and wine are symbols of Reality ... The
Imagists are Catholic; they believe in Trans-substantiation.' (53)
Looking beyond Great Britain briefly, one finds Heidegger as a young man
writing for the antimodernist journal Der Akademiker. (54) What might
the relation be between his theological antimodernist training, his
career as a philosopher and his critical disposition towards modernity?
The whole primitivist strand in painting, dance, sculpture and music
relates to a relativism of religious experience, which is thought to be
a corollary of modernist theology. (55) J. G. Frazer's The Golden
Bough thus contributes to a secular version of theological modernism.
The way these art forms provoked the establishment can be compared to
the provocations of theological modernism. Perhaps it is time to examine
how far the aesthetics of post-Symbolist art movements, which we still
understandably associate with attacks on formal conventions, have a
political dimension, which, in their occasional resistance to the
psychological and the subjective, for example, is informed by the
cultural politics of antimodernism. How far did all these isms take
strength not simply from questioning tradition in ways that theological
modernism was doing, but from the more unified antimodernist texts
which--like manifestos had a far more unified sense of mission. Was
Pound's characterisation in 1938 of the post-WWI 'rappel a.
l'ordre' a belated attempt to appear to have
emulated--belatedly also--the Vatican's successful reactionary
strategies ?56

It should be clear that I am not trying to show that cultural
modernism was the radical cultural wing of 'theological
modernism', but rather to provoke a closer look at theological
modernism and its imbrications with cultural practice in the modernist
era. Once cultural modernism is seen through the lens of theological
modernism, new cracks begin to appear in the former; and the old cracks
that we have often sensed are there, suddenly have a much clearer
explanation. All those we consider to be modernists, and indeed all
those writing in the modernist period, have, I suggest, some kind of
orientation towards the ideas of those thinkers grouped by the Vatican
as 'modernists', and towards the Vatican's war on those
thinkers. The orientation may have been one of surprise, contempt,
anger, indifference, sympathy, awe or respect. The consequences range
from outright rejection to emulation: for the success of the Vatican
must have appealed to those considering conversion. Exploring that
orientation and imagining the breadth of it leads us to think about the
modernist period in a new light that is not only more relevant to that
period, but also radically different.

(2) Michael Whitworth provides a typical instance of this
re-inscription, quoting Perry Anderson's attack on this
'emptiest of all cultural categories', then constructing his
own sense of the term: Modernism: An Anthology (Oxford, 2007), p. 3.

(4) For example, Peter Childs makes no allusion whatsoever to
theological modernism nor, shockingly, to religion as a context for
modernism in general, in Modernism, 2nd edn. (London, 2008). Lawrence
Rainey acknowledges the Vatican's deployment of the term in a
theological context, but draws a sharp distinction between the
'predominantly Protestant culture of the English speaking
world' and the 'Catholic' and European context of the
term's theological application: 'Introduction', in
Laurence Rainey (ed.), Modernism: an Anthology, (Oxford, 2005), p. xx.
This fails to acknowledge how the theological modernist controversy
spread to Protestant churches in both England and the US, nor does it
present the controversy as a context for the European avant-garde. Roger
Luckhurst observes, quite rightly, that: 'Catholic liberalism ...
attracted the kind of outrage the artistic avant-garde could only dream
about': 'Religion, Psychical Research, Spiritualism, the
Occult', in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, eds, Peter Brooker,
Andrzej Gasiovek, Deborah Longworth and Andrew Thacker (Oxford, 2010),
pp. 433-34. One problem with introductions, surveys and anthologies of
literary movements is that, to help build a canon of texts, they pass
over contemporaneous documents that would help map counter discourses.
The Vatican's 1910 'Oath against Modernism' is a
manifesto of sorts, virulent and radical in its way, blasting various
features of modern intellectual life, and ought therefore to feature in
anthologies alongside canonical modernist manifestos.

(5) For previous discussions of the relation between 'cultural
modernism' and 'theological modernism', See Matei
Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham, NC, 1987), pp. 69, 78-9; and
Gary Lease, 'Modernism and "Modernism": Christianity as
product of its culture', in 'Odd Fellows' in the Politics
of Religion: Modernism, National Socialism, and German Judaism (Berlin,
1995), pp. 110-27. For welcome recent studies which explore the
potential relationship between the two modernisms in more concentrated
detail, see Damon Franke's Modernist Heretics British Literary
History, 1883-1924 (Columbus, OH, 2008) and Geert Lernout, Help My
Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion (London, 2010). Originally published
in 1988, Lease's essay claims convincingly that a threatened Church
was reacting against trends of modernity. However, his understanding of
modernity and 'cultural modernism' is inaccurately limited to
forms of 'anti-representationalism'. In fact, both theological
modernism and the early phase of modernist literature shared a
scientist's appreciation of objective facts alongside the effects
subjective viewpoint has on observation. When the realism of, say,
Tolstoy acknowledged subjectivity, it was not being hostile to
representation: in such cases, the field of representation was showing
that it could stretch to contain perspectivism and interiority and these
are not necessarily anti-realist. The possibility and historical fact of
evolution within Christian dogma are informed by both a realist and
perspectivist point of view.

(6) Malcolm Bull, 'Who was the first to make a pact with the
devil?', London Review of Books, 14:9 (14 May 1992), 22. This
review article has been scandalously neglected.

(7) Perry Anderson, quoted in Whitworth, Modernism, p. 3.

(8) Developing and proving a theory of this kind has become much
easier to illustrate now that magazines and newspapers from the period
have been digitized. In researching this article, I have made extensive
use of the Modernist Journals Project, the Times Digital Archive, and
Periodicals Archive Online. I have also profited from conversations with
Erik Tonning and Matthew Feldman and, above all, Matthew Creasy's
excellent editorial work.

(9) The Catholic Church is not of course unified in relation to its
orthodox and reactionary positions, and so different factions do
perceive them differently. Nevertheless, that the dogma of papal
infallibility remains intact, that Pope John Paul II effectively
expunged liberation theology from Latin America, and that the 1998
encyclical 'Ad Tuendam Fidem' could require an oath of
allegiance from theologians, clearly illustrate a continuation of Pope
Pius X's strategies.

(31) For Astradur Eysteinsson, Scott-James 'prefigures a good
deal of critical response to modernism as a historical and cultural
force': The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, 1990), p. 18. Randall
Stevenson describes Scott-James's use of the term as
'surprisingly early': See Modernist Fiction: an Introduction
(Kentucky, 1992), pp. 1-2. But, as this article shows, the term is far
from 'early' in 1908.

(37) Some of those denounced as 'modernists' did continue
the debate, like Maude Petre whose Modernism: its Failure and its Fruits
(London, 1918) was widely reviewed. Others, such as von Hugel, a
correspondent of Petre's, was brought to heel and came round to the
orthodox viewpoint. See Kelly (ed.), especially letters from pp. 169-73
where Hugel renounces the terms used in his earlier period when
advocating reform.

(54) John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumour of A Hidden King
(Indiana, 1994), p. 53.

(55) This is implied in the Pascendis attack on 'modern
philosophy' which comprises Freud and Kant. Modernists claim that:
'the need of the divine... is first latent beneath consciousness,
or, to borrow a term from modern philosophy, in the subconsciousness,
where also its root lies hidden and undetected. [Modernists affirm that]
our most holy religion... emanated from nature spontaneously and of
itself. Nothing assuredly could be more utterly destructive of the whole
supernatural order': 'Pascendi', paragraphs 7-10.